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3 It’s not just my assiduous reading of Jorge Semprun that has led me
to use his novelistic « you » from the very outset of this text. Rather
it is the instinctive wish to establish a distance between he who took
these photos in Japan from september 1979 to January 1981 and he
who writes in February 1982 in Paris. It’s not the same. Not for banal
biographical reasons: one changes, one is never the same, one should
have to use the novelistic « you » for an entire lifetime. But I know that
if I were to return to Japan tomorrow, I would find the other again,
I would be that other.

Let Japanese politeness at least preserve me from boring the reader
with my problems of doubling. To speak of these things I should
have to give them the sumptuous and colorful forms of the Japanese
stories of Doubles, those tales where the prince disguises himself
as a blind beggar, where a man metamorphoses into a horse (the
TV adaptation of Hsi yu chi, with the sublime Natsume Masako)
where a cat changes into a woman. That last is the Bake-neko, the
sorceress-cat, and you won’t cut her short.